Interesting. To me I just feels like a series of unrelated miniseries (I don't think author and broad genre are really enough to link the seasons on any fundamental level). Whereas if there was a big picture I think it could help carry the weaker seasons.

FauxOwl wrote:The concept of the season long anthology show is fairly new... are there other examples than True Detective, American Horror Story and Fargo? If that's the case and there is no connection between the stories in True Detective, it may be the only one where the seperate stories are completely disconnected. There have been many single episode anthology shows... not sure if there's one where stories are connected.

The UK version of Skins is basically a bi-season long anthology show. The characters completely change after every two seasons. This lasts for six seasons, while the seventh, and the last, season has some of the characters from previous seasons but now older.

There was this Twilight Zone type show called Outer Limits that tried to tie all the individual episodes together, but that was pretty hokey and clearly not intentional from the beginning

True Detective could go this route and I would love that, but I'm sure if it is the case Pizzolatto won't discuss about it yet. I still feel he did that smoke screen thing in the first season and didn't talk about the mythos story intentionally.

This is actually what makes this one writer concept quite interesting. This way the writer can actually have "secrets" and have totally own story. But of course there are problems with this method too. Sometimes writers room could actually hone stuff and cut away some weeds.

I just feel like this season has no feel of direction to it. It doesn't seem to know where it's going, and it's already 5/8th's over with. Even the better episodes have a scattered, messy feel to them. The disparate plots don't really cohere in any way. It's just a big stew of various stuff, some good and some quite bad. I thought things were looking up after episode 3, which was intriguing and built momentum nicely, but episode 4 was like a poor man's version of last season's episode 4 (i.e. a lengthy, well-crafted and exciting action set-piece that ultimately has no real relevance to the rest of the show). And episode 5 was both good and immensely disappointing, feeling more like a low-key season premiere than the first hour of the second half of the story. I can't see how the remaining three episodes will build things up so interestingly that they will tie together and justify all the messiness and flaws of the previous episodes... just such an odd season of television, this.

I've been seeing a lot of Lynch this season. The bar with the girl singer, Colin's dream with the guy singing (Blue Velvet, anyone?), the cowboy. Last night's episode brought me a lot of Twin Peaks: Audrey at One Eyed Jack's with Cooper and Truman on the outside knocking off security guards to get her out of there. Best episode so far in a overall pretty disappointing season.

I must confess I didn't entirely grasp the reasoning behind the undercover operation. Presumably to get information about who at these parties may have had motivation to murder Caspere, but what exactly would have been the expectation that the lead investigator on the case for many months, who has likely spoken to many suspects and been recognizable to someone in the party, could accomplish by infiltrating it posing as a prostitute expected to have sex with anyone who approached her? The most useful information gleaned seems to have been the location of the party, which could have been gleaned some other way. Didn't Ani's pursuit of the missing person come about seperately from the central investigation? I mean she wasn't there looking for her, right?

Agreed, this was a great episode, primarily because of the direction. If Pizzolatto decides to go with a single director again next season (and if anyone wants the admittedly gruelling job), I think Miguel Sapochnik would be a great choice.

The final episode of the 2nd season was the best episode in the whole series. FINALLY it was interesting to see where things were going.

All in all, the second season was better and more interesting than the first season. I still stand with my notion that the faults people saw in this season were very much prevalent in the first season too. They were just hidden in the layer of careful cinematography and acting. The second season wasn't anything special what comes to visuality, and the acting was at parts extremely corny (which I thought was the case with the first season too, but I think it may have been better executed there).However, for me, the most important thing in any tv show is this: Are the situations interesting? Sometimes an interesting situation can be complex with tons of layers to peek through, and sometimes an interesting situation can be some person doing things not necessary for the plot but just having the task of creating that single part of that world in the show.

I thought the first season had really small amount of interesting scenes. The visuals didn't make the scenes interesting for me. McConaughey's way of overacting the underacting (wow, how is that even possible ) didn't make any of the scenes interesting for me, except for the final scene of the first season.

The second season had at least one interesting scene in every episode. For me, that alone made it better than the first season. And in the final episode there were tons of them.

I REALLY enjoyed the first series and have since re-watched it. I very much enjoyed the second series - although I watched it much later and my hopes were very low, maybe it was better than what I was expecting? The second series also improved a lot as it went along. I thought Farrell and McAdams were excellent. Vaughn and Kitsch no so much and pretty miscast. I too, like others, thought there was a few nods to some Lynch tropes.

I liked S2 more on re-watching, definitely. Though I still think it's pretty fundamentally flawed and the plot/central "mystery" is just not interesting. The real highlights come from Farrell and McAdams, from the character moments, and some occasional strong set-pieces.

I'm also just finishing up another re-watch of S1 and while the last two episodes feel like a slight deflation of what came before them, it's still a tremendously strong season on the whole, if not the life-changing peerless all-timer many claim it is. I think the first three episodes are tremendously interesting because they're so mysterious, and then 4-6 are even better because they add a more visceral power while still giving little away. But, perhaps inevitably, the solution of the mystery in 7 and 8 just can't quite match expectations or the tantalizing opaqueness of the early installments. I'd say the same applies to S2 but I barely could tell you what the mystery is, let alone its solution. Now there's an example of sloppy, over-complicated narrative mechanics trying to pass itself off as a "noir homage." Nah, it's just dull, somehow both under-written and over-written. If Nic had gotten at least another year or so to write S2 I'm sure it'd be a good deal better. He also should have never cast Vince Vaughn, who does pretty well part of the time but mostly just stands there awkwardly delivering faux Milch-isms.